EXCERPT 17, FLY IN THE MILK
Johnny Beam leaps from frying pan into fire in Chapter 3 of Fly in the Milk, ebook available wherever books are sold online:
Half an hour later the three of them were bouncing along on bumpy, two-lane asphalt, ghostly snow and dark woods closing in on both sides.
Dig the spongy, yellow front seat of Lambert’s big gold Plymouth: Gloria in the middle, rubbing her thigh against Johnny’s to the beat of rock music coming from the dashboard radio, WEBC, 560 AM, on the dial.
Twenty minutes on the blacktop and a couple miles on iced-over dirt before they swung into the rutted drive of a ramshackle building, remarkable only for its existence in the seeming middle of nowhere. Cars were parked anywhere that would accommodate them, filling the adjacent roadside for fifty yards in each direction.
Johnny guessed they had to be paying off the local constable to overlook this large volume of visitors at a boarded-up wooden shack in the middle of a jack-pine forest. He found out later he was right. The clubs did enough business to afford payoffs without blinking an eye, and there were a lot of needy, underpaid constabularies in the woods of northern Wisconsin. In most cases and most places, with the exception of the occasional young and over-zealous officer, the rural cops hardly ventured out at night in the cold of deep winter, unless there was a call. And as long as nobody got maimed, mugged or murdered, the blind pigs were allowed to continue operations.
The big Plymouth bounced along the tree-lined drive and pulled directly in front of the sagging, gray, two-story house of moderate size that one time might have held a family of six. Lambert wheeled into a private space marked by a wooden sign nailed to a post in the ground, Management painted crudely in red house paint.
Lambert switched off the ignition, shut down the lights and took the revolver from under the seat, put it in the waistband of his trousers, got out of the car and smoothed down his jacket over the bulge. Johnny and Gloria got out the other side. Beam’s heart was beating like someone was working a speed bag in his chest and he surged with a peculiar excitement.
Jimmy and the lady walked up a trampled pathway of dirty snow while Johnny kept slightly behind, breathing deeply of the cold air. It was dry and crisp and smelled of wood smoke. The three stepped onto the warped, ice-speckled porch and Lambert gave a hard rap on a thick metal door with an eye-level viewing slot. A dull roar came through the thin walls. Yellow light seeped through the cracked and yellowed shade of a bay window. About fifty feet to the right of the porch was an outhouse with a sagging roof and two men beside it in the gauzy moonlight, urinating in the snow.
The door is the only thing solid on this whole damn building, Beam thought—truly a business with low overhead. The slot in the door made him smile. But man, where did all these cars come from? Hadn’t been a house for miles.
“You like this door, Johnny?” Lambert asked. “I had it specially made for this place. This welder I know can do some pretty cute things. The guy is a genius, but he can hardly even read. ‘magine that, eh. The guy is a goddamn genius with metal and cars and stuff like that but it would take him a fucking hour to read a goddamn postcard, if he could do it at all.”
The slot slid open with a metallic click. Raucous noise bled out. A pair of yellow, translucent eyes beneath a narrow forehead and a shock of greasy black hair filled the space.
Lambert scowled at the eyes in the slot. “Open the goddamn door, Gooder, you retarded cocksucker. Can’t you see who this is?”
A metal bolt scraped and the door jerked open.
“What the fuck, Ray?” Lambert snarled.
“Sorry Jimmy,” said a lanky, oily guy in soiled blue jeans and a red flannel shirt. “I was just surprised that it was you, uh, when I saw the… uh… they ah—don’t look like our normal customers, so I—”
His voice trailed off as clouds of tobacco smoke billowed out into the night. There was sawdust on the floor and a great roar of voices trying to be heard over a loud jukebox. Johnny noticed a couple of large and rotund women standing among a crowd of men at a bar made of unvarnished wood.
Ray Gooder stepped out of the way and the three walked in.
“These are my friends, Ray. That’s all you need to know,” Lambert said, his face tightening. “Don’t ever make me wait out here again, you hear me? Where’s your fucking brother?”
“He’s in the back. I’ll tell him you’re here,” Ray said, the tendons in his jaw bouncing.
“I think I’ll just go back and surprise him tonight, Ray. Ted likes surprises, don’t ya know.”
“All three of you going back there?” Ray said, squinting at Johnny.
“Is there a problem with that?”
“No,” Ray said, pushing a hank of hair back into his pompadour.
(To be continued)
T.K. O’Neill’s crime novel Fly in the Milk is available on ebook at online bookstores, including Barnes and Noble, ebookit, Google, iBookstore (Apple), Amazon, Sony Reader Store, Kobo (Borders) and Ingram Digital.
Fly in the Milk – $2.99 at https://amzn.to/2LbNJ8j
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